NBC News has a backgrounder.
It’s trickier than I thought. I was under the impression that it was the middle class and the wealthy who were as angry with the new President as they had been toward Chavez, but the students are joining in too. It’s not hard to figure out why:
Venezuelan society is in dire straits. A person is murdered in Venezuela every 21 minutes. Imports and staples such as milk, flour and soap are in short supply and cost a fortune.
Venezuela has runaway inflation, last year registering at 56 percent — the highest rate in Latin America. And the government’s attempt to control foreign currency coming into the country has created a virulent black market in dollars. While the official exchange rate is around 11 Venezuelan bolivars to $1, you get 80 bolivars to the dollar on the black market, and many goods are priced based on black market prices. Frequent power blackouts are also a common complaint.
The thing that makes little sense to me is that it’s got huge oil reserves, perhaps not the largest in the world as former President Hugo Chavez claimed but awfully big nonetheless. It’s got a highly-educated population. It’s got a universal health care system. Given all of that, you’d think it would be much better off than it is.
THEY HAVE TOILET PAPER SHORTAGES OMG.
This is what happens when socialists believe their own press releases. They have basically stolen and redistributed the inventory of an electronics chain in an action quite reasonably described as “government-sanctioned looting”. State-run health care? That’s nice.
My sister-in-law is from Venezuela. Her family is still there. It was bad enough under Chavez, but he at least had the political skills and charisma to keep most of the people on his side. So, now that everyone knows about the fraud of an election to get Chavez’ hand-picked successor in power and the millions of dollars stolen by Chavez for his family and his cronies, and now that the police are just thugs working for Maduro, and now that there is no bread on the shelves and no electricity in a country with oil to spare, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the people are fed up.